Run River Run

A new anthology celebrates the life, near-death & hopes for revival of the Santa Fe River

Elms and riverbank give way to an ever-widening river. Photograph by EC Ryan.

The Unnamable River

By Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Ginkgo Light. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and an American Book Award. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe.

1

Is it in the anthracite face of a coal miner,crystallized in the veins and lungs of a steelworker, pulverized in the grimy hands of a railroad engineer?Is it in a child naming a star, coconuts washingashore, dormant in a volcano along the Rio Grande?

You can travel the four thousand miles of the Nileto its source and never find it.You can climb the five highest peaks of the Himalayasand never recognize it.You can gaze through the largest telescopeand never see it.

But it’s in the capillaries of your lungs.It’s in the space as you slice open a lemon.It’s in a corpse burning on the Ganges,in rain splashing on banana leaves.

Perhaps you have to know you are about to dieto hunger for it. Perhaps you have to goalone into the jungle armed with a spearto truly see it. Perhaps you have tohave pneumonia to sense its crush.

But it’s also in the scissor hands of a clock.It’s in the precessing motion of a topwhen a torque makes the axis of rotation describe a cone:and the cone spinning on a point gatherspast, present, future.

2

In a crude theory of perception, the apple yousee is supposed to be a copy of the actual apple,but who can step out of his body to compare the two?Who can step out of his life and feelthe Milky Way flow out of his hands?

An unpicked apple dies on a branch;that is all we know of it.It turns black and hard, a corpse on the Ganges.Then go ahead and map out three thousand miles of the Yangtze;walk each inch, feel its surge andflow as you feel the surge and flow in your own body.

And the spinning cone of a precessing topis a form of existence that gathers and spins death and life into one.It is in the duration of words, but beyond words—river river river, river river.The coal miner may not know he has it.The steel worker may not know he has it.The railroad engineer may not know he has it.But it is there. It is in the smellof an avocado blossom, and in the true passion of a kiss.